Carnegie Council: Opus Dei by John Allen

John Allen and Joanne Myers in Carnegie Council

Introduction

JOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I'm Joanne Myers, Director of Public Affairs Programs, and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I'd like to thank you all for joining us this morning as we welcome John Allen, our fifth speaker in our series on Religion and Politics. Today he will be discussing Opus Dei: The First Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church.

So just what is the truth about Opus Dei? Is it actually doing the quiet work of His Holiness, or is it a human instrument of power and control, out to effect a covert and hostile takeover of the Church?



Remarks

JOHN ALLEN: Thank you. Good morning. Let me just make a couple of observations on the basis of that very gracious introduction. First of all, you should know that there is actually a member of Opus Dei named Silas. However, unfortunately, he's a short black guy, as opposed to an albino monk roaming the earth in search of the enemies of the Church.

Secondly, it is of course true that I wrote a book called The Rise of Benedict XVI, and I was actually asked just before this talk if the Holy Father had had any reaction to the book. I can pass along to you the message that indeed he did.

You should know about this book that it was a sort of tripartite effort. The first was the last days of John Paul II. The second component was the story of the Conclave for the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope. The third was a kind of projection of where this pontificate is going to go.

Now, the Holy Father read the book over his summer vacation in Val d'Aosta in the north of Italy, and then sent back a message through his spokesperson, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, saying, "Would you please thank Herr Allen for having written this book, among other things, because he has discussed the future of my pontificate, saving me the trouble of thinking about it for myself." So whatever else you may think, at least the Holy Father has a sense of humor.

I'm delighted to be here with you this morning to talk about the subject of Opus Dei. What I would like to do first of all, is say just a couple of brief words about the perspective I bring to the subject; give you some essentials about Opus Dei, a sort of Opus Dei 101 if you like; talk about a couple of the most common controversies that have surrounded Opus Dei; and then perhaps, given the particular interest of this audience, say just a couple of words about the foreign policy, so to speak, that is the political concerns of the Holy See, and how groups such as Opus Dei might fit into that.

First, to begin, the perspective I bring. I am what the Italians call a Vaticanista, which means that it is my full-time professional work to follow the goings-on in this 108-acre island of ecclesiastical life in the heart of Rome that we call the Vatican.

Concretely, that means that when a visiting dignitary is in to see the Holy Father, often I go up to the papal apartment to cover the event. Most recently, I was there for the farewell visit of Prime Minister Kwasniewski from Poland just last Friday. It means I travel when the Pope travels, so I traveled to twenty-five countries with John Paul II, and on and on. Concretely, I think what that allows me to do is see some of the complexities of the Vatican and the Universal Church.

I'd like to tell you a very quick anecdote to drive that point home. You may know that when the Pope travels, he does so in a dual capacity. He is both, of course, a head of state—the Holy See is a sovereign entity in international law that exchanges ambassadors with 174 countries and international organizations. He is also, of course, the head of the Catholic Church. So when he arrives in a foreign country, he is welcomed twice: once in a very formal setting, usually by the president or prime minister of the host country; again, usually in a much less formal setting, on behalf of the local Church, often by the President of the Bishops Conference; by the Primate, if this country has a historical Primate; and in some cases, if it's a very small country, by the Papal Nuncio—that's the Pope's ambassador in that country.

This particular story is set on a trip to Eastern Europe, to a country that had a very, very small Catholic community. It's actually Azerbaijan, which has all of 114 Catholics. I ran the math, and it would have actually been four times less expensive to bring all of those Catholics to Rome than to bring the Holy Father to Azerbaijan. But in any event, obviously that wasn't the point.

The greeting for the Holy Father, the second greeting in this case, was delivered by the Pope's Nuncio, who is a very lovely Italian monsignor, a wonderful man, but has a reputation—and I have to tell you it's a well-deserved reputation— as a bit of a windbag; that is, he goes on and on, and often, the mystery is, without saying very much.

On this particular day, I actually clocked his greeting for the Holy Father at forty minutes. Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, this is a twenty-four-hour trip. We actually thought the Holy Father would be back in Rome before this guy was done welcoming him. I happened to be in the pool covering the welcome, so I was at the end of one row of seats. Immediately across the aisle was the seguito, the papal entourage, the cardinals and other Vatican officials who travel with the Pope. So I was more or less immediately next to a very senior Vatican cardinal—a man I know, I've interviewed him several times. I could tell as this oration was winding on that our cardinal friend was becoming increasingly frustrated. I mean you can tell these things. You don't have to be a genius. His breathing was becoming heavy, eyes were rolling in the back of his head, and veins were throbbing on his forehead, and so forth.

And so, at a certain stage, I felt I needed to give him an opportunity to vent. So I leaned into the cardinal and I said to him, "Cardinal, what do you think?" Well, there was this sort of nanosecond of hesitation, where you could tell he was calculating, "Should I say this; should I not say it?" ? but it was obvious he needed to get this off his chest. So, in sotto voce fashion, he leaned into me and, looking up at this monsignor going on and on and saying nothing, the cardinal whispered to me, "You realize that some Italian village is missing its idiot."

[Laughter.]

Now, in addition to being a once-in-a-career punch line, this anecdote makes a valuable point, which is that only seen from afar could the Vatican look like a "Stepford Wives" environment in which everyone looks alike and dresses alike and thinks alike and acts alike. The truth is it is much more polychrome than that. There are many different personalities, temperaments, styles, outlooks, visions, and so on. I hope what my experience enables me to do is to bring some of that complexity to bear.

I want to do that on the subject of Opus Dei as well, because I think Opus Dei is a topic that is so often dealt with through the prism of myth and sweeping overgeneralization. That is, I think the conversation about Opus Dei often generates far more heat than light.

I hope what we can do today, I hope what I was able to accomplish in the book, is bring a somewhat more complex, and I think nuanced, approach to the subject. In terms of the importance of this subject, let me just very quickly say that in addition to the vast public fascination with this organization, most prominently carried of course in The Da Vinci Code—and that would sort of be the journalistic motive for tackling this project —let me just say a brief word about my motivation as a Catholic for turning my attention to this subject.

I think the truth is that inside the Catholic Church we often have a problem with sustaining rational conversation across party lines. The Catholic Church is, I think, in too many ways today, a house divided against itself. My hunch about this subject was that if we can clear a space in which we can have a patient, rational, understanding conversation on this subject, then it could be a model for how we could do so on any number of other contentious topics. That said, let me give you a few basic points about Opus Dei that I think will help our understanding.

As was said in the introduction, Opus Dei was founded in Madrid, in Spain, in October 1928, on the Feast of the Guardian Angels, by a Spanish priest by the name of Josemaria Escrivá. I think it is important to contextualize what was going on in European Catholicism at that moment. In addition to the fact of the intra-Spanish context, that this was the run-up to the civil war, I think the broader context was there was great ferment in the Catholic Church in the early 20th century about what was seen as—and I think rightly so—a growing gap between the Church and secular modernity; in other words, this tendency to think of religion—"Catholicity," if you like—as a kind of private compartmentalized experience, that, whatever it might mean to the individual believer, had precious little relevance to the broader cultural context—the political debate, economic systems, and so on. There were a number of organizations in the Catholic Church, and creative thinkers in the Catholic Church, that were trying to imagine ways to breach that gap. I think that's the context in which the foundation on which Opus Dei needs to be located.

Escrivá's vision—which, of course, according to his testimony and the tradition of Opus Dei, was a vision revealed to him by God—was the creation of a core of Catholic laity who would be well formed in the spirituality and doctrine of the Catholic Church and then would take that formation and apply it to whatever path of life they happened to find themselves in. So you would have lay Catholic bankers and lay Catholic politicians and lay Catholic architects and teachers and bus drivers and bakers and so on, who would see the ordinary details of their daily work not merely as an opportunity for their own sanctification—that is, making themselves holy—but as an opportunity for transforming the world.

In other words, the idea was that if we want to change secular modernity, we cannot do it from the outside, with a clerical cast wagging its finger at lay people and exhorting them to do moral things; it had to be done from the inside-out, by people who were in and of the secular world, imagining a Christian vision of what secularity and secular modernity might look like and then bringing it about.

Now, as obvious as that may seem with the benefit of seventy years of experience, I think it's worth saying that this was a direct frontal challenge to much of Catholic spirituality and much of Catholic attitudes towards the secular world at the time. Let me make two points.

First, it was a challenge to the kind of clericalist ethos that was, I think, overwhelming, particularly in Spanish Catholicism at the time, in which the clergy were seen as the primary actors in the drama of redemption, and the role of laity was, in the classic formula, to pray, pay, and obey.

Escrivá turned that directly on its head. He said: "No. The clergy are a supporting cast, they are at best a support system, and the real work of redemption and transformation, sanctification, has to be done by laity who are fully immersed in the highways and byways of modern life and bringing a Christian spirit to it." In that sense, I think we can fairly say that Escrivá was in a way a prophet, a visionary, of the Second Vatican Council, which would of course arrive in Catholicism in the mid-1960s, which would herald in the era of the laity.

It has been fairly said that, whatever Opus Dei's profile today may be, however traditionalist or conservative one may see it as, at least in this sense there is no question that they were ahead of the curve in terms of announcing and embracing a much more active and dynamic vision of the lay role.

Secondly, the other sense in which Opus Dei, I think, in Escrivá's vision, was an inversion of what was traditional Catholic thinking is he insisted that the modern street or the boardroom or the assembly hall of a parliament is every bit as religious an environment as a church building. In other words, if you want to have a religious vocation, you do not have to retreat into a monastery; quite the contrary, you can be a seriously engaged, deeply committed, religious person and see in a sense the sacrifice of your work at a board table as every bit as important, as every bit as crucial, an act of sanctification, as the sacrifice that a priest performs on the altar when he consecrates the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. This, too, was very much a challenge to what was contemporary spiritual understanding inside the Catholic Church of his day.

I think it's important to make these points, because my observation is that in much public discussion about Opus Dei we concentrate—I think legitimately so—on matters that are in many ways peripheral to Opus Dei's core message —that is, debates over Opus Dei's money or power or the role of women or corporal mortification. Again, there is a perfectly legitimate conversation to be had about these topics, but the risk is that we miss what Opus Dei actually purports to be about.

The analogy that I came up with in the course of my research is that most writing and journalistic commentary on Opus Dei is similar to doing a book on General Motors without mentioning that they make cars. In other words, you're not quite getting to the core of what this organization is all about.

Now, having said all of that, let me then turn a couple of those controversies. Obviously, I can't pretend to be all-embracing—we could spend considerably more time than we have talking about all of the different question marks and myths and concerns about Opus Dei that have grown up over the years. What I want to do is pick up a couple that I think are representative, and then, obviously, I'm happy to respond to any questions you have.

In my experience, in looking at the most common public controversies surrounding Opus Dei, I think you can separate them into two categories. There are those concerns that dissolve upon contact—that is, once you take a hard look at them, they go away. Then, there are those that, even after you have made a sustained, deliberate effort to try to understand it from the inside-out, rational, well-meaning people without an axe to grind are going to draw very different conclusions.

I want to offer you an example of each. First, let's talk about Opus Dei's wealth. As you undoubtedly are aware, there is a public perception that Opus Dei is an enormously wealthy organization, sitting on secret bags of cash, and that over the years this has generated conspiracy theories, such as that Opus Dei bailed out the Vatican Bank in the late 1970s when it was, to put it euphemistically, "having difficulties"; and that Opus Dei funneled money to Solidarity in Poland, and in so doing essentially bought the allegiance of the future Pope, John Paul II.

It's easy enough to understand where perceptions like this come from. If you have ever been, for example, to the Opus Dei headquarters here in New York, at 34th and Lexington, that seventeen-story building jokingly known as "the tower or power," it is a fairly imposing edifice and it is fairly sumptuously appointed when you poke around inside. So you understand where the perceptions come from.

But what we did in this book, for the first time, is actually run the numbers. So let me tell you what the numbers are and then try to put them in some context for you.

The primary Opus Dei operations around the world are what are known inside Opus Dei as "corporate works," that is, activities for which Opus Dei guarantees the spiritual and doctrinal formation. This includes a series of universities, schools, hospitals, social service centers, and so on.

In the United States, if you add up the cash value of all of those Opus Dei operations— that is, the total assets of everything that is connected to Opus Dei in the country—you arrive at a figure of $344 million. If you do the same thing for the globe—that is, the cash value of all of Opus Dei's activities around the world—and here I have to say that while that $344 million is a hard number, because of the differences in accounting requirements in various parts of the world, the global number is a best guess. But I think we intentionally crafted this as the most liberal estimate possible—in other words, this is the most it could possibly be—the amount is $2.8 billion. That is, in essence, the value of what Opus Dei owns.

Now let's try to put that in some kind of context. The cash value of the assets of the Archdiocese of Chicago in the United States is $2.5 billion. In other words, Opus Dei worldwide owns roughly what the Archdiocese of Chicago by itself in the United States has.

To take another example, there is a lay Catholic organization in the United States called the Knights of Columbus that has an insurance program that by itself is capitalized at a value of more than $6 billion. In other words, the Knights of Columbus insurance program is two-and-a-half times wealthier than Opus Dei's total set of assets.

Now, I think it's important to say this because there are all kinds of impressions—I think terribly exaggerated impressions—about Opus Dei's wealth. For example, there was a book in the early 1990s that suggested that Opus Dei operated a financial empire that rivaled General Motors. Well, ladies and gentlemen, last year General Motors reported assets of $455 billion. By that standard, Opus Dei simply does not compete.

And if I were to run through for you other common perceptions of Opus Dei—such as its influence in secular politics, its influence inside the Catholic Church, its much-vaunted recruiting machinery—I think what we would find is a similar pattern, which is, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there's not much there there. In other words, to be honest, this is a group that has a much more modest sociological, political, and financial profile than overheated, feverish imaginations sometimes suggest.

Let's shift to category two; that is, questions about which at the end of the day there still remain legitimate debate, legitimate diversity of opinion. Any number of things we could talk about here.

But let me pick up what is usually the very first question I am asked, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, by media, which is Opus Dei's practice of corporal mortification, or to put it in lay terms, self-inflicted pain. There are two forms of this corporal mortification practiced by Opus Dei members.

Now, I should say before I get into that that there are different kinds of Opus Dei members. They have 85,000 members worldwide. I suppose the basic difference is between numeraries, who are celibate Opus Dei members who live in Opus Dei centers; and supernumeraries, who are typically married, have families, have jobs in the outside world, and so on. The supernumeraries are about 70 percent of Opus Dei's total membership; the numeraries are 20 percent; then there are about 1,800 Opus Dei priests, which are about 10 percent of the total membership.

It is the celibate members of Opus Dei, meaning the numeraries and priests, who practice these forms of corporal mortification. In other words, it's a minority of Opus Dei's total membership that do these things.

As I say, there are two. One is something called the cilice, which is a sort of barbed chain that is tied around the upper thigh and is worn for two hours a day every day except Sunday. Then there is a discipline, which is a small cloth whip that is administered to the back once a week, usually while reciting a prayer, the "Our Father," or something like that.

Now, let me say, contrary to what you may have read in The Da Vinci Code, these things do not break the skin; they do not cause massive bleeding. They do not whip you into frenzies of spiritual exaltation. For this book I wore the cilice for my mandatory two hours, and I did try the discipline briefly. I can tell you, while they are uncomfortable, I didn't find them exceptionally painful. To be honest with you, when my wife will goad me into going to the gym to try and run a mile, I find that a lot more uncomfortable than either of these two things.

Having said that, let me try to explain how Opus Dei understands the spiritual logic. In other words, why do it? It is three-fold. The first is to remind one in a physical way of the consequences of sin. The second is to identify with the suffering in the world. The third is to identify oneself with the suffering of Christ on the cross.

It should be said about this that these are practices with a rich pedigree in Catholic spirituality. Great saints of the Church, past and present, have done these things, from Dominic and Francis in the 12th and 13th centuries to in the 20th century people such as Padre Pio, Pope Paul VI, Mother Teresa—all of them engaged in these practices. Prior to the Second Vatican Council, these were, I think, almost universally practiced inside Catholic seminaries and religious orders and so on.

Nevertheless, in the post-Vatican II period, they have been, I would say, largely abandoned in mainstream Catholic life. I suppose the primary reason has been concern about the potential for abuse. That is, I think it is somewhat seductive for an idealistic young person to believe that if a little bit of pain is good, then a lot of it must be great, and so there is this tendency to push towards excess.

Now, Opus Dei members will tell you—and I think they are telling the truth, in my experience—that they are very vigilant about that sort of thing, that they are very careful to insist that this must be done in moderation.

They also say that, frankly, these two practices are a very minor piece of the broader picture of mortification—that is, a kind of denial of self and sacrifice for others—as they understand it. I mean they will always say that going without a cup of coffee, or taking out the garbage when it is not your turn, is just as valid a form of mortification, and that, frankly, you could take away these two things, that is the cilice and the discipline, without changing very much about Opus Dei's spiritual understanding and spiritual practice.

Again, I will tell you that, having said all that, at the end of the day, there still are a lot of people—and again I say rational, well-meaning people, who have no fight to pick with Opus Dei—who will still find these practices hard to understand and hard to accept, either at an aesthetic level, since they will just find them kind of repugnant; or they will find them, frankly, self-destructive, and therefore just very difficult to get their minds around. I think in that sense—and there are any number of other examples—Opus Dei is, to some extent, a sign of contraction; that is, it is deliberately, self-consciously swimming against the tide of much contemporary Catholic opinion, to say nothing of the thought patterns and presumptions of the broader secular world.

To read the rest of the discussion, please see John Allen and Joanne Myers in Carnegie Council .